If we do take the same example of Pachmann's introducing words to one of his recordings, we can easily find the places where he "betrays" the feeling of a tactus – mostly by deliberately hesitating before words that he wants to accentuate.

Another example: I will "translate" spoken words of the already mentioned Vladimir de Pachmann to a possible structure of time instants, where red lines represent main/"melody" notes and the blue lines represent their imaginary anticipation. What we can see is a permanent need for aspiration, suspension and tempo modification.

Second Observation: Rhethorical Dislocation

First Observation: Declamatory Disloction

Pachmann superbly translates this rhethorical way of speaking to his playing by rushing or hesitating in the "narrating" voice (left hand) and thus "betraying" the tactus (right hand).

Play Declamatory

The idea of this section is that spoken language contains asynchronous structures that can be imitated in musical performances. Thus the interpretations will sound in a way declamatory, "as if spoken". I will show that declamatory or rhethorical asynchronities of language were resembled in early recordings of the 20th century more freely than in modern performances. Simple strategies to play in an asynchronous style will be developed and tested.

Nicholas Cook mentions in his monumental work Beyond the Score two types of tempo analysis: tapping – as it was usual in the earlier days of empirical research in recordings – and the visual way, based on spectrograms. While the later obviously has a greater accuracy, Cook doesn't necessarily sees it to be the superior method:

"Visual methods (and algorithmic methods, of which more shortly) are then more accurate if the aim is to extract onset times, and are more or less indispensable if the aim is to work with onsets below the level of the beats. However if the aim is to capture the experience of tempo—the feel of the music as a dancing partner, so to speak—then a real-time auditory method based on the tactus is arguably more accurate."1

However, spoken language doesn't only include the natural bloom of vowels and permanent tempo inflections, it also offers the possibilty of a rhethorical anticipation or delay of words deviating from the natural rhythmic flow of language. 

In the opening eight bars of Chopin's Prelude in B minor he uses rethorical dislocation for expressing

  1. doubtful hesitation, instability
  2. confirmation
  3. interruption

 In any case, the higher creative principle is to betray the own tactus, to disappoint it by being late, to surprise it by being early etc.

Visible in the spectrogram on the left is the sound of a vowel, while the consonants are located in a much higher, seperated frequency range. My goal is, to find a declamatory way of playing. For this, I assume that

  1. consonats are represented by an articulatory silence ("aspiration" in Couperin's terminology)
  2. the bloom of the vowel is represented by a dislocation ("suspension in Couperin's terminology)
  3. Both means are connected with rather extreme tempo inflections.

Arpeggiaton has, as well as the phenomenon of dislocation, not only a structural but also a articulatory, declamatory or even rhetorical function.

It's a phenomen of spoken language, that a syllable can bloom, so that the dynamic peak isn't equal to the beginning of the note. The starting point as well as the point of peak both represent one note. The bloom of spoken language is to be considered the pendant of bloom in music.

When I speak the German word "groß", it roughly looks like this when viewing as a spectrogram:

1 Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score. Music as Performance, New York 2013, S. 144.

Those words are taken from a recording of Pachmann playing Chopin's Waltz Op. 64, 1 (listen it here).